Nicolette

Nicolette

In this posthumous work, Robert Zend bends and often breaks every rule of layout and poetic convention. His text takes us into a time warp across two continents as his obsessive love for Nicolette, the unconquered muse, defies fate and gives birth to Nicolette, the book.. Zend was a prolific writer in both English and Hungarian. His collections of poetry have received the attention of both Jorge Luis Borges and Northrop Frye.

“So many of the people who wrote to Robert Zend — Borges, Marcel Marceau, Norman McLaren — kept coming back to the same point: what you are doing is somehow like what I’m trying to do. That means that it hits a central nerve of the whole creative process.”
— Northrop Frye

“Zend was a literary genius able to elicit smiles, tears, and profound thought — one at a time or all at once. His writing is unique and unbelievably imaginative. It is rich with metaphors and allusions to a vast store of literature ranging from Nietzsche’s existentialism to the poetry of Omar Khayyam to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”
— BC Teacher-Librarians’ Association Reviews

“Zend displays his fascination with dreams as creative outlets; as the place where our concealed metal life bursts through each night while we sleep.”
— Virgina Beaton, Books in Canada

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Founded in 1988, Ronsdale Press is a literary publisher of innovative and insightful books. We publish fiction, poetry, regional history, biography and autobiography, children's books, and books of ideas about Canada.